Marc Nash issues a provocation to all the arts communities - artists, performers, authors, poets, dramatists, film directors, and empty emptors. They have all settled cheaply, and become enervated.

Behind the unbarbed wire upon which vellum, parchment and ink lay drying, an unplugged quartet of guitar, double bass, tom-tom and vocalist gave a recital. With all the mechanical passion of the figures striking the hour on Prague’s Anatomical Clock. Marking time. Beating time. Passing time. Killing time. The youthful rebellion and insurgent energies of rock and roll now contained by executive moguls and derisive Svengalis, with the volume turned down so as not to wake the ghetto Kinder. There is no whiff of any kulturkampf within the palings of the UK’s culture camp.

The stand up comedians are to be found sitting down, before the Pathétique cine cameras that serve the internment with a lensed record of the entertainment within its walls. Participating in panel quizzes conflating news with comedy and comedy with news. Placing the emphases in the wrong places for laughs. Save for certain of their Celtic brethren who still rail through microphones. For they know who they are at least. Standing in opposition to the majority tribe in the penal colony, a different coloured badge sewn into their stripey pyjamas. And in between the panel shows, when the mirthsters do perform live, they celebrate shared dispositions with their audience. Comedy (not humour) drawn from spotlighting quotidian quirks. Captive audience recognition, sagely sitting on their hands in canny agreement, affirming how uncanny détentional life is.

In the next barrack block along, conceptual artists working with materials found around the camp, such as elephant dung, condemned houses, unkempt beds, dead sharks and diamonds. The children of the artists’ colony are asked to stick their hands in paint and then press their palms up to the wall to render an image of Camp Commandant Savile. What other choice do they have? In the inceptive Theresienstadt, a painter who refused to paint a portrait of the ghetto’s doctor was shipped off to an extermination camp. The art produced here is beyond the reach of all bar the Kapos’ patronage. Instead it is displayed in museums and galleries, for empty emptors to ogle. Passively queuing round the shower block, as if waiting for a glimpse of cadavers lying in state. Coffin art. Coffer art.

The dancers at least were pushing the boundaries of their confined bodies, a sub-rosa escape committee. But since their language was abstruse and non-lingual, no one could understand the urgent messages their bodies were conveying. They weren’t seen around the camp very often. It was presumed they were underground, quarrying a breakout tunnel. Leaving the above ground stage clear, for serving up ballroom peacock mating displays accompanied only by Grub St. pecking personal narratives.

Dramatists put on performances for the inmates in cold concrete 1960s monoliths. Plays that are a tourist version of Albion. Period pieces. Museum GB pickled in aspic. Revival Britain, when sleeping dogs should be let lie. Or shot. Oooh we’re staging Romeo and Juliet in 1950s seaside Margate, with the Montagues as Mods, the Capulets as Rockers and we’ll have Lambrettas and Vespas, Triumphs and Nortons on stage at the end of the pier show. On ice. Any playwright worth their sea salt, ups and leaves this barracks for the privileges of the log-burning studios in the film and television production blocks. Where the stamp of ‘funded by the UK Film Council’ in the opening credits, reflexively causes audiences’ heads to drop in anticipation of inevitable disappointment and defeat.

And then the largest bloc of all, the authors and poets. Of which I am one, according to my camp tattoo, number 202,500. In a world of propaganda, post-truth and fake news, what better gladiators to duel with the concept of truth than us fiction writers? For we supposedly apprehend the relationship of fiction to reality. Our screeds billowing among the untended weeds growing between the stakes, are far stronger a restraint than any Krupp razor wire. The flimsy fences are actually constructed from market forces. The watchtowers are unmanned, the panopticon formed by a reticence to rock the boat. To startle the horses. To cause offence. Fence without offence. An off fence. Unelectrified and unelectrifying. Therefore the writers were penning themselves in. Those who wrote escapist yarns and those who gazed at their navels trying to extract precisely where they extracted from. For the former fail to ask themselves, why life is such that one needs an unending diet of escapism in order to continually veer away from it (as they too dream of a better life in the television and film bunker)? For the latter, nothing wrong with examining the dimensions and hue of the camp badge worn over one’s heart, except they overlook the rest of the rep of their striped pyjamas shared by every inmate in here. Atomising art both. Making wraiths of us all. Ghostwriters with their primaries in absentia.

There are no guards in Theresamayienstadt. No censors. The inmates at the Czech Theresienstadt couldn’t see beyond the walls, so they wrote poems and painted pictures of their lives inside the ghetto. Our artists can freely view outside the fenceposts of their hipster ghetto, yet they abjure depicting the scenes beyond the gossamer chicken wire. Staring them in their averted faces, the privations and assaults on the non-combatants. Whereas the Red Cross visited the Czech Theresienestadt and deemed it satisfactory, in our time they have proclaimed the National Health Service as being on the point of representing a humanitarian disaster. Where was the protest of any of this? From artists who had meekly accepted the commodification and profit accountability of their own professions back in the 1980s. The erection of the cash nexus stringers and pickets behind which they currently labour. Or from creatives who had politics conferred on them in the 1990s, when they took tea at Number Ten and were thanked for endowing Cool Britannia.

Where even are the triumphalist artists of now? Those who have secured their political and cultural revolution, where is any celebration of the fact of their vision in art? Where are erected any monumental architecture, giant statues, the huge canvases and murals? Nowhere that’s where. Not because they are all philistines. Some are barbarians. They do possess a modicum of an expressionistic form of their own. A folk art of Union Jacks, bulldogs and silhouettes of some of their country folk framed as no-entry signs. Tea cosies and towels. Tattoos and T-shirt designs. Commemorative pottery. The occasional spitefuelled comedian who never gets invited on to the same bills as the rest of the recumbent stand ups resisting on their laurels.

And so our artists willingly present picture postcard images. ‘Love from Theresamayienstadt UK’. ‘Wish you were here’. That all is right with the world in the thousand year obscurantist Reich. Our lords and masters nod, satisfied at their dolls’ house and count the export dollars and tourist roubles it generates. We fail to appreciate our own power. For we have Stockholm Syndromed ourselves. We don’t even have to break through the palisades, we could just walk through without any snagging of our corduroy.

I saw the best minds of my generation, and they had settled cheaply and become enervated.